Prevent Don't Promote Marijuana/THC Use

…because pot is an unregulateable habit-forming and addictive substance which quickly slips out of control.

Already a black market is under-selling “taxed and regulated” pot in Colordao. There is still no reliable way of knowing exactly what is in the pot being sold. Reliable testing would be so expensive it would send many more users to cheaper unregulated sellers. The notion of seed to sale tracking is a pipe dream. You can’t put a gps chip in every seed, bud or leaf. It’s easy to dump excess inventory onto the black market. And it’s easy for criminals to grow and sell the drug — but difficult for anyone to determine the source of the product.

Other clear and proven escalated health risks across a marijuana using population include: increased anxiety, depression, amotivational syndrome, respiratory illness, impaired memory, psychosis, schizophrenia, impaired decision-making associated with a doubled risk of car crash, increased school dropout and stopout rates, and a host of other social pathologies. In the largest and most robust longitudinal study ever done on use of this drug (1,000 people over 30 years), an average 8-point IQ drop was found for regular long-term users — regardless of socioeconomic status.

Once aware of the negative health outcomes associated with this drug, the average American will not support the profiteering that is driving the “tax and regulate” drumbeat for this drug. The taxes won’t begin to cover regulatory, enforcement or treatment costs. And regulation of this drug will fail as profiteers and black market pot pirates will always be looking to prey on the vulnerable to make a fast buck.

We saw what happened when Big Tobacco reined unbridled, savaging lung and heart health and targeting the young as lifetime customers while taking in huge profits. Big Marijuana hopes to follow in the very same footsteps, but this time brain health is added to the list of risks. Compromised mental health is too high a price to pay for a drug policy which legalizes pot.